"there is a limit to all things so this will never do"

(116.35-119.9)  We pick up with the narrator digressing a bit from the analysis of ALP's letter to once again comment on the cyclical nature of human existence.  This is the way of love, the narrator says:  "The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times"  This is also the pattern of the Wake (thunderbirth, life, death, and river-resurrection) and (as the secondary sources point out) the Viconian system Joyce used as one of the bases for the Wake.  The narrator approaches this idea with a bit of comical exasperation:  "So what are you going to do about it?  O dear!"

The digression goes on for another paragraph.  This time Vico is referenced by his first name:  "jambebatiste."  "The olold stoliolum" is told in every conceivable language and will go on forever, for "billiousness has been billiousness during milliums of millenions."  Both the letter and the Wake -- "this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections" -- will keep on popping up, always an old story, but always fresh and relevant to our situation.

Going back to the literary analysis, the narrator once again emphasizes the trouble with . . . well . . . analyzing literature.  While we "may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot," the narrator assures us that the letter (and the Wake) is of "genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness."  The story told in the letter is complete, over, and written into history.  But even if someone thinks he or she has a true grasp of its meaning, that person will always have a sense that "this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye."

We can ultimately only give our own personal interpretation to the letter and the Wake, the narrator says, because "every person, place and thing of the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time."  Everything in life (and, it seems Joyce is arguing, quality literature) is fluid, whether it be an individual's personal development or language's evolution.  We're lucky, the narrator tells us, that "we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it . . . after all that we lost and plundered of it."  We can only cling to the hope that "things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour."